堕地獄

Rubens made this enormous panel around 1620, at the height of his powers in Antwerp, running a busy workshop and painting for courts across Europe. The subject comes from the Book of Revelation, the war in heaven, where the archangel Michael and his angels cast the rebel angels and the damned out of the sky. Rubens paints it as a single unbroken fall. Bodies tumble and twist all the way down the canvas, tangled with demons, dragged into the dark at the bottom, while Michael breaks in from the top left out of a burst of light. There is almost no ground and no rest for the eye, just this churning cascade of flesh. Painters and collectors were so taken with it that it was copied and studied for generations.